Customer‐Satisfaction and Risk‐Aware Pricing Policy for Profit Maximization in Cloud Computing

ABSTRACT Cloud computing has been attracting increasing concern due to its remarkable flexibility and substantial economic returns. As a crucial feature of cloud computing, cloud service providers typically offer customers various resources through on‐demand services and charge them accordingly. Considering servers as the service carriers in cloud computing, their availability may sometimes be affected by potential uncertainties, which can lead to temporary server breakdowns. It should be noted that such cases related to the availability of servers have rarely been examined in the profit maximization problem. In this paper, an optimal configuration scheme for addressing the issue of profit maximization in the cloud service system is proposed, taking server breakdowns into account. By introducing the concept of generalized service time, the probability density function of waiting time is initially derived. Owing to the complexity of the designed function, a two‐stage fitting method is employed to obtain its approximation, thereby significantly reducing the analysis difficulty. On this basis, considering the average waiting time and server breakdowns, a compensation mechanism is adopted to design the pricing strategy for customers. Then, the revenue, cost, and profit models of cloud service providers are constructed. Since the optimal solution of the profit model is difficult to calculate due to its complexity, a heuristic algorithm is introduced to solve its numerical solution. Finally, the proposed scheme is verified through a series of numerical simulations, and the results indicate that the profits of cloud service providers and customer experience can be satisfied simultaneously.